


to a place inside where there is joy

by eudaimon



Category: American Idiot, Band of Brothers, Generation Kill, The Pacific - Fandom
Genre: F/M, M/M, Multi-Era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-31
Updated: 2013-01-31
Packaged: 2017-11-27 17:48:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 20,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/664728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eudaimon/pseuds/eudaimon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Brad has had a date written on a scrap of paper in his wallet for over a year and it's a date that he intends to keep. A journey myth of sorts – Brad sets out across America, pausing at various points across the way. What he can never really know is this: that he is not the first man who came home from the war to make this kind of journey. His path criss-crosses with those of three other men; Joe Liebgott who doesn't know where he's going, Tunny Clarke who doesn't really know who he is and Robert Leckie, who's struggling with what he needs to leave behind. It's a much a story about America as anything – a story about distance and how you live with it...a story about what it's like to come home and find a country that big waiting to be crossed. And nothing ever really changes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. San Diego to Kansas City

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Warbigbang, 2010.

_“Find a place inside where there is joy, and the joy will burn out the pain” - Joe Campbell_

 

He lies in his grave and listens to the chatter of the radio between Ray’s shoulder and his cheek. Somewhere not too distant he can hear Doc Bryan and Poke talking. He shifts and the sandy soil shifts with him and he listens to the way the world moves around him as its centre. He can’t make out what they’re talking about. The stars are brighter here than in San Diego. He knows that there are stars that can be seen only from the Southern Hemisphere. And he wonders what else is out there that is beyond understanding and cannot be seen from the point at which he’s standing....

Sometimes, he finds himself wanting to do more than just be.

His little ones down for the night, Ray quiet for once and watchful enough for all of them in the dark, Brad finds himself restless and pushes out of his Marine-shaped hole in the ground. He walks between the Humvees, his weapon at his shoulder. In the shadow of a vehicle, he finds Nate in his grave. He crouches down, out of sight, and reaches out, touching, lightly, Nate’s jaw. A Recon Marine is a waiting creature, detail orientated, and Brad has made a project out of memorising Nate Fick, for all of the good it can do him when they’ve had time to lie down in a bed precisely once, and everything else has been stolen moments and wasted opportunities.

Nate’s eyelashes flutter. In the dark, his eyes are dark like the ocean can be.

“I thought I was dreaming,” he says. The corner of Brad’s mouth catches on a smile and he bends down and Nate pushes up just high enough that their mouths meet. Brad remembers wanting to kiss Nate the first time that he set eyes on him and that’s never really changed. The kiss lingers for a moment and, the whole time, Brad’s listening for the sound of boots on dust, the tell tale metallic sound of a shifted weapon. He feels Nate smile rather than sees it. Nate’s hand comes to rest against his thigh.

“Living dangerously tonight, Brad?”  
“If I was living dangerously, I’d be in that hole with you.”

The second kiss is harder, pushier, and it’s proof of how much either of them can want. Brad ends up breathless and backed up, both hands up in something like surrender. And Nate’s the only one that Brad’s ever surrendering to; no affront to his Warrior spirit, just the way that things turned out, hoo rah.

Semper fi. Be the trouble that you want to see in the world.

*

He wakes up alone, and thinks about brushing his teeth.

*

**1.** _San Diego, CA_

For a long while after waking from another familiar dream about Iraq and things he never did there (would never have done there), he lies quietly in the middle of an unmade bed. He’s always loved this apartment, with its courtyard full of bike parts and the balcony at the back but, most of all, he loves his bed and not just because of the memory of the scant times he’s had Nate here and woken up in the middle of the night in time to watch Nate pad across the bedroom naked and slip back into bed.

It’s more than that. It has to do with a little space of your own and quiet space that doesn’t smell of anybody else’s sweat. Rare, in a Marine’s life. Worth it.

On the pillow next to his head, his phone trills. Brad’s always had a weakness for gadgets and his phone is sleek and silver but at least it sounds like a fucking phone. He curls one hand up over his head and glances at the number before he answers with his thumb against the touch screen.

“It’s late, Nate,” he says.

“You’re awake, aren’t you?” Nate sounds amused and Brad imagines him lying in bed in Boston, one arm up over his head, 1st Recon t shirt. Sometimes, it seems miraculous to Brad that Nate can apparently take easily to any life he chooses but Brad’s always known what he was meant to be. He’s got ‘warrior’ written on his bones.

“I am awake,” he concedes, amused himself, phone cradled between ear and shoulder as he shifts. There’s no clock in the room because he hates the ticking and he’s never needed one; war fucks with circadian rhythms but it still feels late. “I was just thinking about you.”

There’s a pause on the other end of the line. A muffled sound which Brad imagines is Nate dragging his shirt over his head. Even if he didn’t, Brad imagines him bare chested, hair ruffled and just lying back down again.

“Are you going to tell me?”  
“Same old dream. I was in Iraq again.”  
“One day everything will stop being about Iraq.”

Brad knows that they both doubt that.

“Far be it for to make this any more homoerotic than it undoubtedly is, Nate,” says Brad, taking his time, “But I would sleep easier if you were here.”

Nate laughs, just a little. Brad feels himself smile in echo.  
Sometimes, it feels like everything in the world’s an echo of something that’s already happened. 

“Me too, Brad.”

The first time that either of them said anything about love, he was making coffee, aware of Nate moving around behind him and then there were arms around his waist and that sentiment breathed in his ear. He trusted Nate with his life and the lives of brothers; intimacy was easy. Being in love came as no surprise at all.

“When are you going to leave?”  
“Soon as I wake up. I’ll be there by Thursday evening.”

A rustle of pages on the other end of the line; Brad knows as certainly as his heartbeat that Nate’s just reached for his date book.

“Thursday’s kind of shitty, Brad, but if I’m not here, you’ve got your key.”  
“I do.”  
“You can come in and make yourself at home.”

He wouldn’t want it any other way. He shifts his weight comfortably, sheets sliding against bare skin. For a moment, he just lies there and listens to Nate breathing. In two years, they haven’t spent nearly enough time in the same bed. He lies there with Nate on the other end of the line and he imagines lying side by side. He imagines rolling onto his side and skimming the flat of one hand down the planes of Nate’s chest and belly. He’d shift his weight just so. They'd end up lying close together in the middle of the bed and it would be Nate who kissed him, leaned in and kissed him with one hand pressing down past the elastic of his shorts.

“Penny for your thoughts, Brad?”

Even in Iraq, it had felt like Nate could read his mind.

“You know what I'm thinking,” he says, deciding to rein himself in, for now. He hears the catch in Nate's breathing and he knows that nothing's changed here; somewhere, the width of a country away, Nate Fick is still working miracles and reading minds.

Sometime in the next few minutes, Brad falls asleep with his phone still in his hand and Nate's voice still in his ear, telling him some story about Harvard which will be long forgotten by the morning.

*

**2.** _East L.A, CA_

The road between San Diego and L.A is fine, usually, but today it's a little congested. His bike hums under him, against him, reminding him that it is a thing born and bought at great expense for speed, and it pains him to idle for construction work. The leathers are new and may never fit him as snug as the old ones in his closet in San Diego, made to fit him, second skin. An image of Nate in a battered leather too big through the shoulders, tugged close across his chest, dark wool scarf tucked tight under his chin.

_Get on the bike, Nate_ , he said, but Nate just shook his head.  
 _Maybe tomorrow_.

He shrugs his shoulders and guns the engine. There's a BBQ in East L.A that he's promised he'll show his face at, promised Poke a month ago that he'll show up and drink a beer, and Nate's not expecting him until Thursday, so an hour will make no difference here.

The party's in full swing by the time Brad walks into the yard, jacket already shrugged, beer picked up enroute in hand. There's a swell of relatives unfamiliar to Brad Colbert and his neat, barely extended family, but he feels welcome, always, here. Maria Espera looks up at him and smiles, her arms full of a baby who isn't hers. He picks Poke out of the crowd easily enough. 

It never ceases to amaze him how different Poke looks here. He ought to be used to it, used to seeing guys for beers when not deployed, but with Poke, it's like a whole body change. He comes home to his wife and children and slips so easily into being somebody else. Sometimes, Brad wishes that it was a knack that he knew.

“Glad you came, Iceman,” says Poke, offering a hand that, in turn, pulls Brad into a quick embrace. Brad knows, has always known, that their friendship amuses Poke but he's never made friends easily and, the ones he makes, he tends to keep. He likes it here, different from his white-on-white apartment in San Diego and, even if it's not something that he'd ever _want_ , it's a pleasant place to visit from time to time.

“Well, I said I would, didn't I?”  
“I know you did, dog, but you know as well as I do, how shit can and does come up.”

Brad shakes his head and hands over the beers, trading six for one cold one that he unscrews because one beer won't hurt and he's halfway through it before he feels a little hand slip into his. Babies have always terrified Brad, no matter how many times he's been told that they're not as fragile as they appear (and they appear so fragile, held in hands more used to handling artillery and ammunition and engine parts) but kids...he likes kids. He spends a lot of time around his sister's kids and there were the kids in the desert, the ones who brightened when you looked at them, waved, held out chocolate in tentative fingers. Jessie Espera has known Brad since she was a tiny child and now she's big enough for dance lessons, old enough to be pirouetting between relatives and squinting as she looks up at him.

“Hi,” she says.  
“Hi.” He smiles at her, a bright, broad smile, one that he reserves for certain people in his life, and always for her. He carefully set his beer on one side and then bends down and picks her up. She wraps her arms easily around his neck. “How's it going, Jessie? Have you been having fun?”

She nods, solemnly. She's got a lot of her Mom in her but, sometimes, she reminds Brad so strongly of Poke that it's painful. Right now, she's giving him the same look that Poke gives him when he's about to launch into something particularly colourful, even more comic on the face of a four year old girl.

“Are you going to show Brad your dance moves, baby?” asks Poke, smoothing one hand over her dark curls before grinning at Brad. “She's got pirouettes and everything, dog.”

“Can't wait,” says Brad, and mostly means it. Sometimes, it feels like he's two people (it's a feeling which he knows that Poke would understand. There was the Brad who was out in the desert, combat effective, warrior, shrunk to his most useful size. And then there was the other Brad, who was the same, but less. Sometimes, he can feel where one meets the other.

He might be standing there holding Poke's little girl in his arms the way that he'll probably never hold a child of his own, but the truth is this: his heart? Already dreaming east. In his head, there's a map of all the miles to cover, and he could tell Poke why it's so important that he make good time, but he won't because he might go way back with Tony Espera, might number him among the very few human beings that he can bring himself to love, but that doesn't mean that Poke has the capacity to understand this thing that has come to pass between Brad and Nate and that doesn't mean that Brad would ever do him the disservice of asking him to try.

Two things: Nate Fick and the United States Marine Corps.  
Brad never had a problem with not telling.

He sets Jessie down on her feet and watches as she spins away and he retrieves his beer and takes a long, cool swallow. The bottle sweats against the palm of his hand.

“Where to next, Dog?” asks Poke, and Brad shrugs like he's got no real plan, shrugs even though there's a map in his head, a straight line between one ocean and another, that scrap of paper in his wallet and that date he means to keep. While Jessie pirouettes, Brad checks his phone and finds a message from Nate, three words, not much but enough to call to mind windows thrown open to a sudden summer storm, water pooling on the floor and Nate's body, the press of Nate inside him, lips against his chin, his jaw, his ear, I love you breathed and taken into memory.

Three words.  
RAINING HERE TODAY.

Jessie's still dancing and he's yet to finish his beer, but the truth is this: he's already gone.

*

**Interlude: Liebgott** _(Between Boulder, CO and Salt Lake City, UT)_

War and, for a long time after that, the road. Cold, too – for a long time, he feels like he's going to be cold in his bones for ever. Not the cold of Bastogne, the honest, wet cold of close-packed snow and the sudden warmth of a guy next to you, pressed together from shoulder to hip. Not cold the way Bastogne was cold but cold the way he felt sitting in the back of that truck with his head cradled in his hands and his mother tongue, his _mother's_ tongue on his lips. The bitter taste of familiar words and the sound of gates closing and the smell of cigarettes and shit and loss.

It's a cold that never leaves him.  
A thought: what if it ruined him for warmer times?

Through summer, he lingers in humid places, picks up a few hours' construction work, a few taxi driving shifts. He cuts some hair. His own hair, he pushes back from his forehead, lets it get dirty and greasy. There is a part of him that knows that it will always be difficult to give a shit now that he's back in pants with torn cuffs and t-shirts worn soft. His hands have a tremour that he's unused to and he's sure that he used to be smoother than this; he used to make pretty girls smile.

It's been a long time since he was last in Oakwood.  
It's been a long time since he last saw the lights on the bridge through the fog.

It's less humid up here, drier but still hot, and he finds himself starting to think of home. It's been two years since he said goodbye to Easy in New York City, turned his back and walked away, allowing himself one last glance over his shoulder to watch one man pause on the corner, straighten his hair across his forehead, raise his hand to hail a cab.

For two years now, Joe's been dreaming of what might have happened if he'd slid into that cab alongside Webster, before it had time to pull away.

Here was the thing: Joe had never really forgiven Webster for missing the long cold in Bastogne and that had always coloured how he talked to him and how he touched him too. Oldest of six kids, Joe Liebgott never really learned how to be quiet and he never really learned how to be still and there was this stillness in Webster, sometimes, that threatened to unravel him. He never knew how to respond to it, so he just grew cold instead. The last time he touched Webster, he reached out on the quayside and straightened the knot in Webster's tie.

And he'd walked away, but he could have stayed, shit, he really could have, slid onto cracked leather seats and sat close enough that they would have touched along arm and thigh, shoulder to knee, and he could have stayed, and stayed close. Web wasn't heading straight home from the city, so there would have been a hotel room, more expensive than anything Joe could have ever afforded on his own. Web would have moved first, leaning in until his forehead touched Joe's, tugging his tie undone, thumbing the buttons on his dress Green shirts. In Austria, maybe, they took their time once or twice but the rest of it was all rush and noise, all push and shove. Sometimes, when they fucked, Joe felt rough and crazy, left bruises and sucked up kiss marks. Once, he'd left constellations of kisses across Web's belly and thighs but, in that hotel room, he'd have gone slower, softer, down on his knees, with his shirt hanging open and his lips moving over hot skin. They'd both have needed a shower but he'd still have taken his time. Just a blowjob, but it would have been something to remember Web by, in the days that followed.

The days that followed that were long and dry, and, occasionally, he found himself naked in the dark with somebody, his hands grazing skin, felt himself get rough and crazy once again, but it was never the same, because the feeling wasn't there. He'd find himself going through the motions, a kiss here, a touch there; now you step in, now you push your fingers into his hair and now you tug. Always boys. Never girls. He'd forgotten how to be with girls. He'd forgotten how they wanted to be touched and, for a long time, he'd forgotten how _he_ wanted to be touched, too; he'd shoved himself too hard against rough edges and tight corners, all in the misguided hope that, one day, something would feel right. 

Never did though, and it didn't matter how many beds he pulled himself out of, how many times he rinsed his mouth out and how many foreheads he forgot to kiss on his way out the door.

A thought: if he never really forgave Webster for missing Bastogne, what it boils down to is this: that Webster not being there means that he had to go through that long cold alone and it's been two years wandering and he's never really been warm again, after that. Once, cuddled close in a narrow bed, Web whispered to him about about some asshole called Odysseus and how long he wandered and how difficult it was for him to go home after his war.

And somehow, it's been two years, and he still hasn't worked out a way to go back to Oakwood and be plain old Joey Liebgott once again.

And he keeps thinking about how, once, Webster (or somebody who looked very like him) told Joe that a shark has to keep swimming otherwise it drowns. A thing built to breathe water and it'll still drown if it stays still for too long.

Sometimes, drowning in the blood of a man he no longer knows how to be, Joe knows how those fucking fish must feel.

*  
 **3.** _Kansas City, MO_

It always comes as a surprise to him, how still Ray is in his own environment – how like himself, only with the volume turned down low. He offers Brad a hand that pulls him into an embrace and then all but shoves Brad in the direction of the bathroom. Which Brad can appreciate. It's hot and he's been wearing leather for twelve hours today.

He strips and showers in Ray's narrow bathroom and, afterwards, he wipes at the mirror with the palm of his hand so that he can shave, too. He pulls a clean t-shirt on over damp skin and pads through the apartment on bare feet. These jeans are ragged at the hems from being worn ever so slightly too long.

The door to the balcony is standing open and Ray's already got two beers standing on the rail. Brad's been here a handful of times, eaten dinner and met Ray's fiancée. Spend enough time in the same Humvee as a man, believe in his driving and trust in him as the best of his kind, and you forget that there was ever a time before you knew him. Brad slides into the seat beside Ray, Ray passes Brad a beer and, for a long moment, nobody talks.

In Iraq, he never would have thought it was possible.

“She's working until late,” explains Ray, his own beer paused halfway to his lips. Brad nods but he doesn't speak again until he's drunk off half of the beer in a series of long swallows that feel good in the heavy humidity that's so unlike Southern California. Sweat prickles against his hairline and he wonders why he bothered showering in the first place.

“Just us, then,” he says, neck of the bottle resting against his bottom lip for a moment before a smile catches in the corner of his mouth. “Jesus.”

Few people make him laugh as easily and often as Ray Person. Another one on that list that he has brought himself to love. These are the people you never have to thank, and are never thanked by, but it means nothing, in the end.

Because something means more.  
He was never given to sentimentality but he's loyal,a nd, when he loves, it's never given freely but at least it's deep.

 

They end up talking about mutual acquaintances; the ones still in the Corps, the ones who, like Ray, had the sense to get out. In his bones, Brad knows that he'll never have that kind of sense. He's got 'MARINE' written on his bones, never knew any different. Adopted, he never doubted his parents' love for him, never wondered where he belonged, but from the first time he'd walked into that office in Oceanside, he'd known that he was there to stay.

No point in arguing with a forgone conclusion.

“I think I'm going for this job in this Blueprint store,” Ray's telling him, a world away from verbal diarrhoea and dick jokes but still there in the twitch in the corner of his mouth, the cigarette twitching between his fingers, sparking when Ray talks with his hands. A different guy entirely but somehow also fundamentally the same. Genius RTO, sure, but something out in the world, too.

Brad doesn't see enough of him.

“Sounds good,” says Brad, and raises his beer to that.

Ray's fiancée's name is Beth, and she comes home smelling faintly of antiseptic, wearing scrubs and a faded 'Dawn of the Dead' t shirt. She pulls off her hat and drops it on the table next to her keys and then she comes out onto the balcony and wraps her arms around Ray's skinny as fuck shoulders, dropping a kiss into his short hair.

“Hey, Brad,” she says, reaching out to snag Ray's beer and, when there isn't any in it for her to steal, Brad offers her his instead.

“He's my favourite,” she says, moving around to slide into Ray's lap, both beer bottles cradled between her knees. Ray rubs one hand up and down her back and, for a moment, Brad misses Nate like a part of him. He feels like a straight up pussy admitting it to himself, which doesn't mean that it isn't also true. 

“Only because you don't know him, baby,” says Ray, giving Brad his best shit-eating grin before he lands a kiss against the side of her neck, and Brad remembers all the talking that Ray had to do after Rolling Stone's book dropped and they all read it and some of them had more explaining to do than others. Jenni had called; Brad had spent five minutes with the silent receiver cradled between ear and shoulder before he put it back in the cradle.

“So where to after this, Homes?” asks Ray, Beth drinking the rest of Brad's beer and settling comfortably back against Ray's shoulder, her eyes drifting closed. Brad's eyes linger on her profile, for a second, but there's nothing there and not just because she's Ray's girlfriend.

Observe everything....

“Philadelphia,” he says, shifting comfortably in his chair. Beth offers the bottle back and he takes the last swallow of beer, liquid warm from the bottle being cradled between her knees. “Should get there around lunchtime the day after tomorrow.”

“Doc Bryan's in Philadelphia,” explains Ray, combing his fingers through Beth's hair, probably the most tender thing that Brad's ever seen him do, and he struggles to fit it into what he knows about Ray Person, and, in the end, he just shrugs and lets it go. Ray tells Beth about how much of an ornery fucker Tim Bryan really is. In his pocket, Brad's cellphone hums and shivers.

Still listening to Ray and Beth talking, he shifts to get it out of his pocket, scuffing his thumb against the touch screen. One new email received.

>   
> FROM: nate.fick@gmail.com  
> TO: iceman74@gmail.com
> 
> SUBJECT: Checking In
> 
> _Just checking in and making sure that you're on schedule and arrived safely at Ray's. Just finished dinner, about to get some school work done. Say Hi to Beth and Ray for me._
> 
> _I miss you._
> 
> _N_
> 
> **”Begin, be bold and venture to be wise”**  Horace

A smile tugs at the corner of Brad's mouth – this is the effect that Nate has on him. Beth and Ray are talking about her day and she works in the ER, so there's plenty to tell, and Brad feels absolutely no guilt when he opens a new email.

>   
> FROM: iceman74@gmail.com  
> TO: nate.fick@gmail.com
> 
> SUBJECT: Clarification Needed
> 
> _How much do you miss me me?_
> 
> _(I miss you too)._
> 
> _Brad_   
> 

“We...are going to bed,” says Beth, straightening up, sliding out of Ray's lap and holding out both hands. Ray takes them, sliding to his feet. He leans in and grazes his mouth against Beth's and then straightens, his shoulders pulling back slightly before he holds out his hand for Brad's empty beer bottle.

“We'll try not to make enough noise to keep you up, Homes,” says Ray.  
For a moment, with Ray grinning like that, Brad's back in the desert again.

Beth swats at Ray with her free hand and then leans up, draping one slender arm around Brad's shoulder and drawing him into a quick hug and a quicker kiss to the cheek.

“There's more beer in the fridge,” she says.

He's back on the balcony, a fresh beer sweating in his hand and condensation running down over his knuckles when his phone buzzes on the table beside him. He lifts the bottle to his lips and takes a long swallow. A Recon Marine is a creature skilled in waiting. Anticipation is healthy for the soul.

>   
> FROM: nate.fick@gmail.com  
> TO: iceman74@gmail.com
> 
> SUBJECT: Clarification Enclosed
> 
> _So much that all I've been able to think about all night is you being here. I'm sitting in a bar in Davis Sq. and all I can think about is coming home on Thursday and actually getting to put my hands on you. Remember last time you were in town and I bent you over my kitchen table? We're definitely doing that again._
> 
> _N_
> 
> **”Begin, be bold and venture to be wise”**  Horace

>   
> FROM: iceman74@gmail.com  
> TO: nate.fick@gmail.com
> 
> SUBJECT: RE: Clarification Enclosed.
> 
> _Oh, really? And here's me sending perfectly innocent emails and hoping that you'll tell me you love me. Shame on you, Nate Fick._
> 
> _Brad_   
> 

>   
>  FROM: nate.fick@gmail.com  
> TO: iceman74@gmail.com
> 
> SUBJECT: RE: RE: Clarification Enclosed
> 
> _On the verge of having drunk too many beers, which DOES NOT negate the things I intend to do to you when you're finally here._
> 
> _Definitely love you though._
> 
> _N_
> 
> **”Begin, be bold and venture to be wise”**  Horace

He ends up lying in Ray's spare room, on top of the sheets and still in his boxers, phone held up in front of him as he writes one last email. His alarm is set for an early hour: the road still calling.

>   
> FROM: iceman74@gmail.com  
> TO: nate.fick@gmail.com
> 
> SUBJECT: RE: Clarification Enclosed.
> 
> When I'm there, you can do anything you want to me. You can fuck me anyway you want to, get fucked any way you want to. I've got a week there, and I intend to fucking use it. As soon as I send this, I'm going to jerk off while I think about going down on my knees as soon as you come home on Thursday and sucking you off. It's been a year since the last time you came in my mouth, Nate. I want you to think about that when you get home tonight.
> 
> I fucking love you and, one day, we're not going to need emails for this.
> 
> Brad

His phone stays silent on the pillow next to his head and Brad ends up with one hand pressed down inside his underwear, fingers curled around his dick and jerking slowly. There are photos on his photo, taken idly, Nate bending to tie shoelaces; Nate with his fingers pushed into his hair, studying; Nate half awake and smiling in rumpled white sheets; Nate in a bar in Boston, more than a little drunk and grinning, beer in hand. Those pictures are there, each one representing a time when they were together and it was okay for them to be together; Brad has to resist taking snapshots of Nate doing things as mundane as grocery shopping or wiping down kitchen counters because he feels this sudden, almost painful impulse to save these moments because God knows when he'll see their like again.

He doesn't know when the fuck he got this sentimental.

The point is: there are pictures on his phone that he could look at, none explicitly designed to be jerk off material, but Nate's face is really all the inspiration he needs. His phone stays on the pillow. He has no need for still images. Tonight, he's got an elaborate fantasy of Nate in his apartment in Boston, stripping out of winter gear, boots and scarf and peacoat, before he leans, chill lips, cheeks and the tip of his nose reddened as he steals a kiss and Brad pushes one hand under Nate's open collar, feels how much warmer he is where his cloth's been layered. Nate is chilled but Brad's warm from a day tucked away inside and the heat is cranked up, way up, and Nate fumbles to get out of his sweater, and Brad stills him, wraps his fingers over Nate's but still tugging up, all but peeling Nate out of the thing and dropping it, already forgotten by the time it hits the floor. Brad's got plans but he's also got a powerful need to _see_ Nate and, as Nate leans in, dragging him into another kiss, longer and wetter, Brad's fingers are busy tugging open the buttons on Nate's shirt.

“Brad,” says Nate, shrugging out of that, too, letting it slip to the floor, but Brad's already down on his knees. He pulls open Nate's jeans, denim damp and chill to the knee from walking from the T in the snow, white cotton underwear. Brad's never been a fan of the predictable but there are some things that are undeniably comforting.

Nate's fingers press into his hair and Brad finds himself grinning. He gave his first blowjob at seventeen, Military Academy cliché, and he always enjoyed giving head but never really _loved_ it until he slid his lips down over Nate Fick's dick for the first time. He strokes Nate slowly, a fluid roll of his wrist and all the while his eyes fixed on Nate's face, watching the way that his eyes widen ever so slightly, throat contracting, teeth touching his bottom lip, and Brad can't stand it a moment longer, he really can't. Waiting creature? Yes. Recon in his bones? Absolutely, but, fuck it, he knows this terrain absolutely, knows it in his bones, and there's no call for caution here and emphatically no call to be afraid.

He slides his lips down over the first few inches of Nate's undeniably beautiful dick. He groans softly and hears Nate groan just as softly in reply. He knows that he could suck Nate off quicker and harder but he tells himself that he's been waiting for this all day and that he means to enjoy every second of it. Nate's fingers in his hair, the press of Nate's dick past his lips. Brad sucks Nate slowly, revelling in the heavy weight of Nate on his tongue, the scent of Nate's body when he swallows him deep enough that the tip of his nose almost brushes skin. Above him, Nate moans something about how good it is and Brad smiles; even when sucking dick, he prides himself on being elite. One of his hands is curled around Nate's dick, thumb brushing against the tightening skin of Nate's balls, and the other reaches around, grasping his ass, pulling him in closer. All the warning he gets is a tightening of Nate's fingers, a short broken sort of moan and then Brad's swallowing smoothly and moaning every chance he gets.

It's a fantasy built meticulously on reality, though he can't now remember what came aftwards, after that blowjob, after Nate was warm again. 

Brad comes hot over his fingers and belly while he's trying to recall. He knows that he ought to feel guilty about jerking off in Ray's guest room, but he doesn't, not really. A few minutes later, he becomes aware of voices filtering through the wall. For a brief, horrible moment, he thinks that maybe he can hear Ray and Beth fucking in the next room but then it occurs to him that they're just talking in low voices, which reminds him of how him and Nate lie talking, sometimes, so close on the pillow that their noses touch, talk bullshit really, tell stories about the sort of days they've had, just shooting the shit and being close, talking to hear each other talk.

It's little and stupid things that he misses most.  
In the end, though, he falls asleep listening to Beth and Ray talking, a room away.

*  
Before leaving, he pauses for coffee in Ray's kitchen, leather and bare feet, the cotton of his t-shirt worn so thin that there's almost a hole over one shoulder. He watches Ray pad around the kitchen smoothly and methodically and remembers days of dry swallowing Ripped Fuel and singing to stay awake. Beth is still sleeping but Ray's up and ready to go to work, dressed neatly, speaking quietly, and there's a joke here, somewhere, about the Grooming Standard, but Brad just drinks his coffee and doesn't make it.

“I don't know how you do it, Homes,” says Ray, finally sitting and drinking his coffee, dishes from last night drying on the rack. “The moving. Fuck, I got home from Iraq and I never fucking wanted to move again. Kansas City's fucking stuck with me.”

“We can't all be as lucky as Kansas fucking City, Ray.”

And Brad just smiles and wishes that he could say something about staying and reasons to stay, but Ray doesn't know about Nate and never will, because Brad loves being a Marine and Nate knows that, knows that better than anyone and, somehow, they find ways to go on.

Ray has to leave for work. Brad rinses both cups and leaves them standing in the sink, and he doesn't wake Beth up when it's time to go.

*

**Interlude:** _Tunny (Between New York, NY and Jingletown, NY)_

They take the bus from New York and he sits awake and watches the lights moving in the dark. The foot that he's missing is a dead weight, itching in a boot that feels like it's laced too tight. He knows that there's a medical explanation for all of this; she's tried to explain but, sitting there on the bus like that, all that it feels like is not being able to get comfortable, the only one awake on a bus full of sleeping souls. It feels like having one more foot than he ought to, at the same time as also having one less. 

Unbalanced.

She shifts against him, turns her face and presses her nose into his sleeve. He touches her hair and thinks about how he doesn't know what he's going to say to Johnny when he sees him again.

They were always born out of war and peace (his own words, sounding heavy and pretentious, now) and, Jesus Christ, he's got no idea what he's doing with himself any more.  
When he does sleep, he dreams of bullets. Dimly, he remembers begging somebody for Novocaine. Sometimes, he wonders if it was her, but she'll never tell him one way or another.

She's good like that.

Kind. She's kind in a way that Tunny and his friends never really figured out, no matter how much they loved each other. They were always too abrasive, too disappointed and fucked up and mean. They always wanted too much but couldn't figure out a way to get more than they had.

He dreams about standing on the overpass and looking down at the lights. It's peaceful in a way that it never was before. Her name still feels like a joke. It's either a joke or a promise; he finds it hard to decide.

The name 'Grace' is only one thing among many that makes her extraordinary.

*

Everyone wants a piece of his time but, for one night, he holds them at arm's length. It's the first chance he's had to spend any time alone with her. He's still getting used to wearing the prosthetic and he limps between the bathroom and the bed, lies down on the crisp sheets in pyjama pants and a t shirt stencilled with his name across the chest. He idly traces 'CLARKE' with his fingers and he watches her undress.

He tries to remember the last time that he was naked with someone else who was naked, with somebody who wanted to see him naked because they wanted to fuck him; he's been naked around her, but only for sponge baths and he always turned his face away.

It's difficult to tell whether they've been putting this off or saving it.

Eventually, she slides across him, wearing black cotton panties and a plain bra. Standing up he feels off balance but lying on his back with her face above him, her weight across him, he can pretend that that bullet never happened. He can pretend that he's young and whole and willing. 

Her body is a doorway and, through it, there's a place where the war never happened.  
Two out of three ain't bad.

She leans forward, kisses the corner of his mouth and his jaw, pushes both hands up underneath his shirt. He remembers lying in a hospital bed and wishing that she'd touch him like this, anything to distract him from the shit circling round and around in his head. And now she touches him and he leans up, presses up onto one elbow with the other hand reaching for her, pushes his fingers into the fall of her long dark hair and pulls her down for another kiss.

_My leg_ , he mumbles. _Shit, Grace_.  
 _I don't give a shit about your leg_ , she tells him, grinning. _Just tell me that nothing's happened to your dick, Tunny._

That makes him laugh like he laughed the first time he heard her real name. _You cannot be fuckin' serious?_   
He'll never figure out a way to tell her how grateful he is for any of it.

She peels his shirt up over his head and he reaches up while still kissing her and unsnaps her bra one handed. It's a trick that he taught himself one summer and he's absurdly pleased to still remember how. He cradles one tit against the palm of his hand and kisses blindly across the other. She moves on top of him in such a way that reminds him that all he's wanted to be since the first time he saw her is _inside_ her and his heels press into the bed and, for a moment, he forgets that there's any difference there at all.

For a moment, it looks like she's just going to fumble their clothes out of the way, but that's not what he wants here. He shoves his pants down around his thighs, elastic scraping against his hard on, and he's so grateful when she takes the cue and starts to strip him naked, barely pausing at all over his prosthetic. He's so grateful that he almost bursts into tears.

He's come home as such a fucking pussy.

When both of them are naked (and she doesn't even glance at his leg, prosthetic discarded on the floor beside them), she presses him backwards with both hands on his chest, leans over him and he watches her hair spill forward over her shoulders and the way she bites her lip before she's reaching between them, curling her fingers around his dick to slide down onto him and his head falls back against the pillow and it feels like a long time before he can force his eyes open to watch the way that she moves above him.

He's inside her before he remembers the last time he was naked with someone like this.

*  
It was always so easy to feel disappointed. Jingletown wasn't much, life wasn't all it was cracked up to be, and they'd been twenty, man, _twenty_ and still waiting for their lives to start. Heather and Will were always fighting; Johnny was always dreaming of somewhere else, stoned off his face on Mary Jane and Ritalin and who could blame him? Tunny never knew what he wanted; he just knew that he wanted more than they had.

He used to look for answers, stood there, dropping glass bottles off the overpass. Sometimes, he didn't even hear them break.

And, sometimes, there was Will, smashed off his face and turning up at Tunny's door, ringing his cellphone so as not to wake Tunny's mom and standing there, swaying in the front yard, waiting for Tunny to open the door and let him inside. He'd all but topple, his head coming to rest against Tunny's shoulder and Tunny's hand would come up and cradle the back of his head and hold him close for a minute. Will was his best friend; what else was he supposed to do?

Usually, how it ended up was the two of them sprawled together on his too narrow bed, some seriously shitty movie playing on the T.V. too quietly to be heard, passing a joint between them or drinking warm beer caged from the refrigerator while his Mom was at her boyfriend's.

It never occurred to him that they'd all have done better sober.

It only ever happened when Heather had been a particularly raging bitch and it was never his idea (it never _felt_ like his idea) but, somehow, Will lifted his head and Tunny turned his to answer him and....

The first time Will had kissed him, Tunny had felt himself startle like a Prom Queen who's date just tried to touch her under her bra without permission. He'd felt his eyes go wide. He'd found himself staring at Will, eyes wide, breathing a little harder than before.

_It's okay, man_ , Will had mumbled, his mouth close enough that Tunny had felt his lips move against his. _It's just me_.

Which was always the problem because Will was always easier to like than Tunny or Johnny; Will never quite got the hang of being as hateful as either of them could be when they put their minds to it. It was always Will who draped an arm around Tunny's shoulders and pulled him in close. It was always Will who kissed his shoulder and looked at him like he understood. Johnny was wrapped up in his own pain, his dreams of being a rockstar or a revolutionary, something fucking lame like that, but Will...Will was just quietly disappointed and, when he fought with Heather, he got so fucking angry but he was always the one who went crawling back.

After the first time Will kissed him, the one thing that Tunny tried really hard not to think about was Heather. 

Two things. There were two things that he tried really hard not to think about: Heather, and how much he wanted Will to do it again.

He always tried to feel guilty about it, after it happened, but he could never quite manage it. He knew that he _ought_ to feel bad but it was like his give-a-fuck was broken and he _wanted_. Jesus, he couldn't ever remember wanting as much.

What the fuck did that even make him into?

What it made him _feel_ like was a complete and utter fag, especially on the night that it went further than just making out and he found himself kissing his way downward, shoving at Will's shirt with one hand. Yeah, he was pretty sure that it was faggy to suddenly and completely want nothing more than to suck his best friend's dick, but Will's fingers had grazed against his hair and Tunny had done his level best to ignore how hard his own dick was as he was tugging open the buttons on Will's jeans, shoving them down around his hips. He remembers that it occurred to him that he had no idea how to go about it, how he was supposed to suck another guy off, but he knew how it felt when it was done to him (always by girls who giggled, afterwards, and covered their mouths while they spat into discarded coffee cups). 

Johnny always said that if that was what happened then he was trying to fuck the wrong sort of girls.

And maybe Johnny always had a point, but Tunny never told Johnny about the night he bent his head, curled his fingers around the surprising weight of Will's dick and wrapped his mouth around the first few inches. Above him, Will had groaned, eyes closed, head tilted back and Tunny had shoved his hand down his own pyjama pants, started to jerk himself off as his head started to bob and Will's fingers pushed into his hair and pulled and he's pretty sure that it shouldn't have felt as good as it did. For a long moment, he didn't struggle against anything; he just sucked Will's dick until he came too soon over his own fingers and then, when Will came moments later, he didn't giggle and he didn't cover his mouth with his hand – he just swallowed as neatly as he could, choked a little but kept it down. Will passed out right after and Tunny just lay there beside him, boneless beside him, the taste of come still in his mouth, sticky on his belly and between his fingers. He lay there waiting for Will's phone to ring, for it to be Heather, for Will to struggle out of bed and pull on his clothes and leave without really looking at him and then they'd be sober the next time they saw each other and neither of them would mention it, especially not in front of Johnny.

Which didn't mean that it never happened again.

*

It was always a struggle to get out of bed the day after one of Will's midnight visits; Tunny would end up lying there all day, wondering what the fuck was wrong with him, not because he wanted to do that to Will (not _just_ because of that), but because he always felt like shit afterwards. He could never, not ever, put his finger on what felt so wrong about it.

On top of him, back in the moment, she moves, her hips fluid, her hair swaying forward to curtain both of them as she leans down and kisses him, changing the angle that he's pressed inside her at. He'd forgotten that it could feel like this; he's not sure that it _ever_ felt like this before Grace. He remembers her learning over his hospital bed and kissing him; at the time, he'd thought that it was a dream but it tastes exactly the same. In the bed beside him, there'd been a guy who went on to lose both hands. Remembering that, Tunny reaches up and cups Grace's face with both hands and holds her to the kiss, rolling his hips, fucking her for a few strokes while he's got her. He does it just because he can and, right that, that feels like cause for a fucking celebration. 

_Don't stop_ , she whimpers, her mouth still pressed against his, her knees pressing into the bed on either side of him as he fucks her. _Jesus, Tunny, that feels so fucking good. Don't you dare stop, Tunny. Don't you dare._

He still has trouble with his leg, sometimes, so she's the one who takes it on and off when he can't, checks the scars. Sometimes, she sits with him half in her lap and rubs lotion over sore skin and wounded nerve endings.

It's the closest he's ever felt to being in love with someone he didn't grow up with. It's probably the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for him. She's easier to love than most of the people he knows. He thinks that's probably because he doesn't know her half as well. Not yet.

He squirms his hand between them, presses his thumb against her clit and looks straight up into her face because he wants to see the look on her face, wants to watch her eyes flutter closed and her head tip back the way Will's used to, only it doesn't. He looks up and she's biting her lip and she's looking straight at him. Something about his face must change because she sighs, so sweetly, and then reaches out to touch his face with one hand, still rolling her hips between his dick and his hand, and she smiles so softly, so open and so bright that he doesn't quite know how to process it. _I love you, Joe_ , she tells him, spine tightening and hands shaking as she starts to come on top of him and that's when it finally clicks into place – the realisation that he might have come home one foot short, but that doesn't mean that, somehow, with her or through her (if her body is a door), he can't figure out how to be more whole than he was before.

Afterwards, both of them still sticky, still trembling (and he's smiling like an idiot), they lie close together and she falls asleep and Tunny thinks about how, in the morning, they'll spend time with his mom before they go and see Will and meet his kid and there'll be less rage, more love, and he'll have gone beyond the place where Jingletown can hurt him at all.

If he's lucky.  
If she's with him.

It isn't done but it does all start to fall into place.  
He closes his eyes, drifts, sleeps deeply and dreams of something other than bullets and flying.


	2. Kansas City to Philadelphia

**4.** _Philadelphia, Pennsylvania_

When deployed, he misses his bike more than he misses most people. His body was trained from a young age not to miss his parents; his mom worries, but she also knows that he loves what he does, that his fellow Marines are brothers to him, that _Semper Fi_ was ever burned into his bones.

His father was an architect before he retired which always seemed, to Brad anyway, to be a profession built mostly on faith; dreams on paper which sometimes came to fruition, but mostly ended with sketches tacked to the office wall in his parents' smooth, white house where Brad still had a bedroom, a box of trophies in the garage. When he was five years old, he sat in a rocker in the corner and watched his father taken a beautiful,c lassic Triumph, clean each piece with great care and then put it all back together again. Brad had been too young to be of any real help but it's still a treasured memory.

Two things his father taught him that have come to shape him in later life; believe utterly in what you can and love your bike. _Trust yourself, son. You'll be okay._

David Colbert's passion was old bikes, classics: Harleys, Triumphs. Aesthetically, Brad had always been able to appreciate that, seen them more as art objects that anything and, yes, they made a satisfying noise, and, yes, taking one apart and putting it back together was a project that he could get behind (in the courtyard attached to his apartment there was a Triumph draped in a tarp, painstakingly put back together, every piece of it retouched or reconditioned and, sometimes, he'd take it out, not fire, idling along the ocean road up to Corona del Mar).

His primary bike, though, the one that he rode often and missed like a part of him, was European, sleeker than the American and English bikes, maybe not as beautiful, but smarter and built for speed. To ride it, he has to lean forward into the wind, grip it with his knees, trust it just a little. In the desert, he explained it as _speed_ and _solitude_. His father would smile, brush away all attempts at justification and shake his head, reassure Brad that _you love what you love, son. You rarely get a say in it._ Years later, Brad was the guy with no photographs in his wallet, just a scrap of paper with a date, but he has long understood the wisdom in that thing that his father once said.

It's a beautiful bike and he loves it.  
It's not the only thing he loves without hope of justification.

It's a good ride down to Philadelphia. He can feel the sun through the shoulders of the expensive leather that Nate bought for him last Hanukkah. Tim Bryan and his girlfriend have moved, recently, and Brad pauses, dragging his cellphone out of the pocket of his jacket to check directions.

When he gets there, he finds a narrow little house, freshly painted so it stands out white in a neighbourhood that's actually sort of grey. At the height of summer, the front yard is teeming with life. At home, his mother kept her garden regimented and neat but this garden right here was an explosion of life. It reminded him of the moment when a very drunk Doc Bryan had reminded him that Iraq had once been the Garden of _fucking_ Eden.

It was something that he'd already known.

He kills his engine but stays on the bike for a moment, helmet in his hands, leather already stifling once the wind's dropped. She's standing in the middle of the garden watching him. Her hair is caught back with pins. There's dirt clinging to her long brown fingers. Long silver earrings. He knows that Tim met her in a grocery store in Oceanside. They moved back to Philadelphia together and now she teaches middle school to put him through med school and, the last time Brad heard, they were sickeningly happy living in sin.

“What?” she says, wiping her hands on her long skirt as she walks towards him. “Your Mom never taught you it was rude to stare?”   
“My mother tried to tell me a lot of things,” he says, swinging his weight off the bike and walking towards her. The fence between them, he leans in and kisses her cheek. She cups his jaw fondly and he catches the scent of her hair, cigarette smoke, growing things. Her earrings make a musical sound when they brush against her cheek.

“Tim's buying groceries,” she says, stepping away from him long enough to open the gate, holding it against her long enough for him to step through it, backpack on his shoulder. Between her breasts, there's a Hamsa charm on a long silver chain. He'd worn one himself, hanging from his dog tags for a while, a favour to his mother. Hand of Fatima or Miriam, a horseshoe on a parachute cord...it didn't matter; you did favours for your mother from time to time, to save her from worrying.

Faith and love, in equal measure.

The guest room in the little house is tucked up in the attic space, narrow and pitched walled. On the stair case, Sharahah apologises, her hand resting in the small of his back.

“It's not much, but it's ours,” she says, smiling. “And if you manage to give yourself concussion on one of the beams, I'll send Tim up to see to you. He shouldn't be much more than an hour.”

She delivers it completely deadpan. It's not hard to see why Doc Bryan fell for her in a check-out line.

He lies down on the futon, a few inches off the floor, and closes his eyes. There's something about it that's comforting; something about it that's reminiscent of lying in a ranger grave. It's easy to fall asleep there, on often-washed sheets, before he's even buttoned the jeans that he's changed into.

He drifts into a dream that he's had before: a wide green river, tropical heat and the low hanging fronds of strange trees. A place that he's never physically been before (though the air feels like Bangkok around Monsoon time). There was a book in Nate's apartment, one of those glossy coffee table affair, so Brad knows that this is the Yamuna River, and Nate's standing there bare chested and flawless, his feet already in the water. A myth: if you bathe in the waters of the Yamuna river, you emerge free from fear of death, but Nate Fick is a Marine, 1st Recon, possessed of a true heart and a warrior spirit and there are other things to fear, much more worthwhile than merely dying. The dream ends different ways. Sometimes, he sits on the bank of the river and watches while Nate swims and sometimes he swims with him, sinks down and lets the cool, green water close over his head or, sometimes, this particular time, he stops Nate with both hands on his shoulders and he turns him and he kisses him while he's still standing with the water lapping against his shins. He pops the button on Nate's shorts. He....

The dream's going even as he wakes up from it, leaving behind only the feeling that he was dreaming something familiar. In the house downstairs, he can hear voices; Doc Bryan's is familiar, a rumble that Brad got used to in the desert, often berating and cracking jokes in exactly the same dry tone. Over the top of it, Sharahah's voice is softer, warmer, low and lovely. Listening to them downstairs reminds him of the times he woke up in Boston and, somewhere in the apartment, he could hear Nate talking on the phone, a call with his mother or his sister or someone calling for a homework assignment, and he'd take it in the kitchen so that he wouldn't wake Brad and Brad would wake up anyway to the gentle hum of his voice somewhere just distant. 

He ought to get up and go downstairs, he knows but, for a moment, it's nice to lie there quietly, his head pillowed on his arm and just listen to them talking, too far away to really be heard.

*

She cooks. In California, his diet consists mostly of pizza and packets, things that are easy to call out for or throw together in minutes, but Sharahah's kitchen is a cook's kitchen, often used, and dinner is laid out in a variety of jewel-coloured dishes. Shararah twists her hair back and pins it so that it won't spill forward when she leans across the table to serve him first, some of everything, whether he asked for it or not. Tim clearly knew better than to help himself; he waited for Sharahah to lean over and serve him too, lips smirking against his beer bottle.

“Just eat it,” he advises, still grinning. “She's gets really fuckin' nasty if you complain too much.”

Sharahah sits down with a serene look on her face but Brad eats the first few mouthfuls of his dinner, chewing carefully. It's incredibly good and, for a few minutes, all he does is chew and swallow, occasionally reaching for his beer. He realises that Tim's looking at him expectantly and, slowly, he sets his beer down.

“What?” he says, finally, barely containing a grin. “I can't help it. I still don't know what I'm supposed to do with you with hair.”

Sharahah sounds like bells when she laughs.

Tim laughs too but it's a laugh that Brad can't get used to. It's hard not to think of Tim Bryan in known terms, hard not to think of him as 'Doc' in the desert; a flash bomb, a tracer and someone yells 'Corpsman!' in the dark. And there he is, stoic and foul tempered as always, but doing his job with gentle hands. Difficult not to think of him when everyone got ass to mouth and he moved among them, berating and encouraging in equal measure and tone. Brad recalls watching him crouch beside Stiney's grave, reaching out to take his temperature with the backs of his fingers; he remembers the set line of his mouth and the weary shadows of his eyes. Brad thinks (he might be wrong) but he thinks that Tim Bryan is not the kind of Marine who trades in war stories; still, there is a part of Brad that wants to tell Sharahah the story of the day that he stood with Nate and watched Tim dealing with Iraqi kids, the clinic always in danger of being overrun and the contrast between the man who had cradled a weeping boy close, touched his skull like he could know him that way and the one who'd come stalking out to meet the adult men, eyes full of fury and underlined with care. Sitting there beside a man who is relaxed and smiling, Brad wants to recount that memory to her because it seems to make sense of how Tim and Doc Bryan could somehow be one and the same, existing in the same pair of shoulders.

He doesn't tell her any of that, though. He suspects that she, of all people, would know that already.

After dinner, Brad helps Tim wash the dishes while Shararah kilts her skirt and waters her garden. Brad tries not to look at her long brown legs.

“Some days, it's like living with Superwoman,” says Tim, up to his elbows in suds, smiling ruefully, his eyes never leaving her in the twilight. “But she doesn't do dishes.”

“No?”  
“Fuck no.”

Brad grins at that; sounds familiar.

At night, when Tim is at home, they work their way through seasons of T.V. on DVD, she says. It's the only way that they ever get to see anything. They sit curled together on the sofa, a medical textbook open on the arm closest to Tim's elbow. It's so domestic that Brad does not know what to make of it. He's never had that with Nate through mutual design; Brad doubts that the corps would approve of wedded bliss and it's never really suited either of them. Still, every so often, it feels possible. There's a moment in every visit when Nate stops wearing pyjama pants and sleeps nude; he makes toast and coffee in Brad's white-on-white kitchen and Brad wakes up to the smell of both; mornings when the humidity breaks and Brad stands on the back porch of Nate's place in Boston and Nate wraps his arms around him from behind.

Those moments always felt dangerous because they reminded him of how much he could want.

Tim and Sharahah aren't helping.

In the end, he leaves them to it and climbs up the slightly rickety stairs to his tucked away bed. He strips down to his skin and lies down in rumpled sheets. He listens to the sound of the T.V. downstairs, the occasional conversation. He must doze because he wakes and it's different, shifted, and what he can hear...the rhythm has changed. Sharahah murmurs something and Tim laughs in reply but it ends in something between a sigh and a moan. A part of Brad knows that it's completely unacceptable to lie there listening to them fucking so he puts in his ear buds and listens to Black Flag as he drifts off again.

He has one dream. He dreams that he's in Iraq. Nate's body above him. He shifts and draws him down for a kiss.

*

In the morning, he pauses on the landing, shouldering his backpack, mouth fresh with toothpaste and he catches a glimpse of her sleeping through the opened door, one long brown thigh, black cotton riding up and her hair tumbled over a face pillowed on her arm. Brad remembers sitting up in bed to check his email and he'd almost always end up staying awake for a while, watching Jenni sleep.

It never feels like he has time with Nate. He always ends up waking him instead.

Downstairs, Tim's sitting on the front steps, cigarette cradled between his fingers. In the field, Brad dipped, got through as much Copenhagen as the next guy, but he's never really got the hang of actual cigarettes. Tim, though...Tim smokes like a man who loves smoking, his eyes drifted close and his head tipped back.

“I keep saying I'm going to give them up,” he says. Brad should have known better than to think that he could sneak up on him.  
“You don't look like a man who's ready to give them up,” he says, sitting down on the step beside Tim to pull on his boots.

Tim smiles and flicks ash from his cigarette before he takes another drag.

“I told her I'd give up when we get married.”  
“When's that?”

He laughs, just a little rumble in his chest and stubs the cigarette out in the little clay ashtray that's tucked into the corner of the step. He stands, shouldering his book bag and pushing his hair back from his forehead. 

“Haven't set a date yet,” he says. “Pass on my regards to the LT.”

Brad doesn't remind Tim that Nate was a Captain before discharge and he doesn't point out that Tim Bryan's got a million good reasons to set a date for that woman who's still sleeping with her face hidden, and not least the health of his lungs. He's the last one who's ever going to council buying a ring. He'd done that shit once; he never intended to do it again, and not just because he doubts Nate would be impressed.

A parting thought: he still does not know what to make of Tim Bryan with hair.

*  
 **Interlude: Leckie** _(Between Rutherford, NJ and Loogootee, IN)_

And the train goes on and on, ratta tatta ratta tatta, heading west, always west. Bob sits alone in a compartment with his temple resting against the window and thinks of other train rides. It's over twenty-four hours to ride from Penn station on Manhattan all the way to Loogootee, Indiana. Vera's packed food and he's got work with him, cramped notes made in cramped notebooks, a half written letter, a novel he's been meaning to read for what feels like years. In a handful of weeks, it will be 1950, which means that the war has been over for five years and they are all older than they have any right to be, those of them who saw the hills of Guadalcanal and Pelielu first hand. He's pretty sure that he bought the book that he has with him a couple of weeks before Pearl Harbour. Sometimes, it feels good to realise that he didn't leave _everything_ behind. Some things, even things as trivial as a paperback novel, did not have to change. 

They are older than they should be, but borrowed time is a miraculous thing  
And some things managed to stay the same, even through all of the struggle.

Sometimes, old wounds still trouble; like a medicine woman or a Shaman, he can sense whether or not the rains will come on time. He knows that many of the guys wake screaming in the night, strangers to their wives and children, but that's never been him; he's always known who is and why he came back, why he struggled back with the memories of friends and why, months later, he watched the news reels with horror. Why, every night since, he's prayed for some kind of forgiveness.

Who could have known that they'd have figured out a way to bring death like only God should have been able to? Death on a scale that only God could forgive them for, later on.

Maybe he found a use for God after all, but only after he figured out the terms of his conditional surrender.

Sometimes, he's so miserable that all he can do is laugh at himself and move on.  
He'd like to think that he was more care-free before Guadalcanal but he's pretty sure that that was never the case. In his mind's eye, he can see the exact look that Hoosier would give him right about now. _Jesus Christ, Leckie – shut the fuck up and be happy that the war's over, would ya?_

He does his best. 

Sometimes (not always, but sometimes, and he always feels a little guilty about it), he feels like he's been doing his best ever since he got home. The truth is this: there is a man who never made it back to New Jersey after the war. Another man came in his place, and he was the one who finally took Vera on a date and he was the one who put on dress blues to marry her some time later. There was a man who Bob Leckie forgot how to be, and he forgot on purpose, to make things easier and to save himself from pain.

The truth: that he began to leave that man behind in the naval hospital on Manus Island, where the heat had been oppressive and damp outside white-blind-covered windows. There, he'd sweated and he'd figured out what to do with that man behind at Bill Smith's bedside because he'd known, sure as shit, that he could not bring him home.

He remembers standing in the doorway of the ward and just staring, for a moment. The skin of his face had still felt hot and tight, but he'd been walking again, in small, stuttering steps. The taste of peaches on his tongue, mingled with ashes. _Have you heard anything about Hoosier?_ And no, he never had, and, suddenly, there it is: the answer to _what happened to Hoosier?_ was there, lying on a ward, in a bed with white sheets pulled back to leave a bandaged thigh open to the air.

“Holy shit,” said Hoosier, finally, eyes only half open. “Lucky fuckin' Leckie. You look like Hell, Bob.”

He'd found himself grinning broadly, so relieved to see the son of a bitch that he almost ( _almost_ ) forgot how broken hearted he'd been.

“Don't worry, Bill; it ain't shit,” he'd said and he'd hobbled to sit down beside the bed.

It took him a year or two to realise it for certain, but the process of leaving everything behind had surely started to happen then, sitting beside Hoosier's bed. Consciously, he'd started to put pieces of himself away in preparation for what he knew was coming, if not tomorrow then sometime soon. He put away the memory of meeting Bill Smith for the first time and he put away the relief of watching him crawl out of that trench with that damn dog. He stowed the joy whenever Hoosier laughed, rare as it was, and the wry creeping amusement of those dry jokes. Last of all, he put away the flicker of warmth that he felt in the pit of his stomach and behind his balls when he remembered Hoosier sinking down onto his knees and pulling open his dungarees, his mouth already damp from kissing, or when he recalled waking in the middle of the night to see Hoosier already awake and standing at the window, naked as the day he was born, with the moonlight picking out scars along his side.

It was then that he'd reached out and touched Hoosier's thigh for what must have been the hundredth time, found it bandaged, this time, and giving off more heat than the rest of him.

He'd wanted to hold onto those things most of all, deadly though they were.

Hoosier hadn't said anything, but he'd looked at Leckie for a long time, and maybe he didn't have to; in the jungle, they had learned each other by heart, like maps and, later, in stolen moments, they had read each other by touch.

He spent as much time beside Hoosier's bed as they'd let him. They played cards and backgammon; he read Hoosier the paper, whether he wanted to hear it or not. One day, they were sitting there in silence; he'd thought that Hoosier was sleeping and found himself just sitting there watching him, his chin leaned into his hand. Bill dragged in a breath, turned his face against the pillow like a man fighting to stay sleeping.

“You're so full of shit, Leckie,” he murmured. Leckie had laughed.  
“I didn't even fucking say anything,” he'd protested.  
“Yeah, but I can hear you thinkin' it,” Hoosier said.

And the day had come, eventually, in the way that days do, when they'd finally shipped them back to San Diego, slow but sure; it had felt like limping home across the ocean, but, then again, Hoosier wasn't the only to never again walk without a slight limp. In Oceanside, they'd looked for Runner, but he'd already gone on, gone to Buffalo, safe in the knowledge that he'd never have to buy himself another drink, standing at the bar with shrapnel tucked under his skin for safe keeping. They'd looked for Chuckler, but he'd been hard to find. 

There's been the two of them.

“How long's it take to get back to...” he remembers pausing, “Where the hell are you from again?”

Hoosier had grinned and taken a long drag on his cigarette.

“Loogootee, Indiana.”  
“How long'll it take to get back to...Jesus...Loogootee, Indiana?”  
“Couple of days, maybe. Why?”

He'd been planning it for weeks.

Sure that nobody was watching them, he'd reached up and squeezed the back of Hoosier's neck; he'd had the impulse to take his hand, but knew that there was no way that that would be allowed.

*

It wasn't much of anything at all in the end; a little room, booked in advanced and paid for out of the wages saved while there was nothing to spend them on but debts owed to the United States Marine Corps. It might as well have been the room in Melbourne where they fucked in the shower and then again in the bed and Leckie had woken up and watched Hoosier standing at the window smoking, naked, leaning up against the frame with the strangest look in his eyes.

 _What?_ he'd said, wishing that he'd had a penny to offer. Hoosier had smirked down at him, cigarette still between his lips.

_I was just thinkin' how fucked up this whole thing is_ , he'd said.  
 _Well shit_ , he'd caught himself thinking. _I love you too._

This room had a bigger bed and not much else in the way of furniture – what else did they need? He'd reached out, fingers curling around the back of Bill's neck and tugging him in for a kiss, utterly unexplained. He'd always felt like he needed permission to touch Hoosier, never really understood the terms that Bill was offering this whole thing (whatever it was) on and on what terms it might suddenly be withdrawn, and he'd been so afraid to fuck up and lose what little fragile time they might have left. This time, though, he pulled Bill to him, crushed their mouths together, crushed his whole body in tight.

“Jesus Christ, just fuck me,” he mumbled, and what he'd meant, he realised later, was _i love you_ , only in that moment he couldn't find words that weren't rough and wrong. And maybe that was only right? Maybe that was all they had any right to expect from each other.

“What?” asked Hoosier, almost looking startled, his hands already pulling at Leckie's pants, nails brushing against the bare skin of his belly.

“Just fuck me,” said Leckie, again. The second time, he hadn't meant anything else.  
He hadn't known any other way to say goodbye in that particular, war-like world.

Another too hard kiss. He could have sworn that he heard Hoosier moan.

At the last minute, backing towards the bed, he changed his mind, stopped Hoosier with his hands on his hips and went down on his knees.

“Seriously?” asked Hoosier, his thumb brushing against Leckie's bottom lip. Leckie remembers nodding.

“I've never been more certain of anything in my entire fuckin' life.”

He'd had it done to him enough times to know the mechanics and he'd spent the entire war figuring out how to do things he knew sweet fuck all about. He curled his fingers around Hoosier's dick, stroking slowly, breathing through his nose, not so much steeling himself as staying in the moment before he leans in and grazes a kiss against hot, soft skin. He didn't hesitate before sliding his mouth down over the first sweet inches. He'd heard moaning and realised that it was him, muffled, and he groaned softly, his hands sliding to grip Hoosier's ass as he tentatively started to bob his head. He was aware of Hoosier's movements only peripherally; rolled his eyes, saw the way that Hoosier's head fell back. Noticed the way that Hoosier's breathing changed. Felt Hoosier's fingers press into his hair. He'd applied himself, determined not to be bad at this. Everything had felt slow and strange; it might as well have been the last night of the world.

He'd never felt like he had less time.

Hands on Hoosier's hips, he was intensely appreciative of the tension with which Hoosier held himself, the care he took not to rock his hips and press too deep. His fingers strayed, brushing down the cleft of Hoosier's ass as he grew more confident, takes Hoosier's dick deeper. Above him, Hoosier was utterly silent except for the soft in-out of his breathing. His free hand came up, thumb nail scraping very gently against the sensitive skin behind Hoosier's balls and Leckie remembers feeling gratified at the way Hoosier's hips had jerked, the way the tip of his dick had all but hit the back of Leckie's throat, and he'd found himself trapped between choking and laughter but he'd breathed his way through it and known that there was no way that he was pulling back before this was done.

He stood his ground. The only warning that he got was Hoosier's fingers tightening in his hair enough to pull. He didn't move. He swallowed, coughed a little but stayed mostly true. When he pulled back, finally, licking his bottom lip, he looked up and found Hoosier just looking at him.

“Get your ass on that bed, Bob,” he said.

He'd ended up on all fours on the bed with three of Hoosier's fingers pressed into him, hot and slippery, fucking him smoothly and he'd never felt so in love, so out of his mind in love, and he'd spilled forward, his forehead coming to rest against the pillow, his hips rocking back, screwing himself onto Hoosier's fingers and he hadn't even moaned. Both of them had learned to be so quiet.

“Just fuck me,” he said, finally. It was the third time that night that he'd said it, but he was pretty sure that didn't lessen the impact. He reached back and grazed the length of Hoosier's thigh with his fingers. A moment later, Hoosier took his hand with sticky fingers. Then and now, Leckie hated the feeling of being left that lonely. There was a moment's fumbling and then Hoosier was pushing into him, one inch at a time and, all that time, their finger tangled together against the sheets.

They'd fucked slowly at first but gained speed, fumbled and fucked frantically; if it was the end of the world, then at least they were going to send it off properly. Leckie couldn't help but think of those nights that he lay in the dark on Guadalcanal and watched the sky light up with flares and bombs.

A little light, showing in ever increasing night.

When Hoosier pulled out of him before either of them were done, for a moment, Leckie was sure that he'd done something wrong. With his ass still in the air, he'd turned to find Hoosier kneeling behind him, fingers curled around his dick, head tipped back and his teeth against his lip.

“What?” Leckie had asked, his dick twitching, every part of him wanting, unable to keep his eyes on Hoosier's face because he was too busy looking at beautiful fingers and a beautiful dick. He'd never really been prepared to think of anybody's dick as beautiful but his own. “Bill, what the fuck'd I do?”

“Nothin',” said Hoosier, flushed, lips damp. He'd grinned breathlessly and squeezed the back of Leckie's thigh. “Just roll over for me. I want to look at you.”

It was the softest thing, the thing closest to care, that Leckie had ever heard Bill say. For a moment, he didn't know what to do with it.

He'd rolled onto his back.

It had hurt, at first, in a different way than anything had ever been painful before; not bad but also impossible to ignore. It had felt like Hoosier was going so deep that he could taste him (ashes and peaches and cigarettes and soapy skin – some things remain in memories and it doesn't matter what the reality of them is, in the end). He'd found himself clinging with one arm around Hoosier's neck, holding him close as their bodies moved together, awkwardly at first but gaining in confidence and grace. With his free hand, he'd dragged Hoosier down for a kiss. 

They'd breathed together for a while.

In the morning, he'd woken up and found Hoosier already gone. It hadn't been a surprise. Dressing, he'd found a note tucked into the pocket of his pants.

> _Fuck goodbye. Stay lucky. - B_

At the time, it had seemed a perfect way to end.  
Later, he'd realised that there were no perfect endings, only endings which left one numb, and hurt less for it.

There is a difference between a thing which is kinder and a thing which is merely less cruel.  
He's back to thinking about bombs again.

He leans with his chin in his hand and watches Middle America roll by. His wedding ring catches and holds the heat of the sun, and he's preparing himself for a similar ring on Bill Smith's finger, a newly married wife and a kid on the way. He's expecting it to hurt for the first hour, to be shitty for a couple of hours after that, but then it'd sink into being something more familiar and what they were to each other then would be over, just another thing that happened in winter, in war time.

He opens his notebook, thumbs through the fragile pages and finds a line written by Rainer Maria Rilke, neat capitals both underlined and circled like it had meant something at the time.

_Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky. _

They write letters, back and forth, occasionally speak on the phone, but tonight will be the first time since New York that they've spent more than an hour in the same room. He wonders how long it will take to feel completely healed and then he thinks about Runner with shrapnel in his arm forever or the guys who came home without certain limbs and never had the lives that they had before the war.

What Robert Leckie knows is this: that for them, and for him too, a new life came instead.

He knows that some of them wake screaming in the night, put the fear of God into wives and children. He never wakes screaming but, sometimes, he realises that he's woken in the night and reached for someone in another bed entirely, someone eight hundred miles distant.

What the war left them with: a sense of responsibility, trouble sleeping and a knowledge of all the things that they had once, and lost.

_Semper Fidelis._  
And the train goes on and on, ratta-tatta ratta-tatta, heading west.

**5.** _Somerville; Boston, MA_

He all but idles his way through Boston; Nate's lived in the same apartment since his first day at Harvard and Brad knows this route like the back of his hand. No pausing to check for directions; homeward bound. There's a part of him who longs to be able to come home to Nate at night, which makes it sound like he wants Nate as some kind of housewife; the idea is both ridiculous and repellent. He knows that Nate is destined for greatness, has known that since the first time he sets eyes on him and he would never do anything to prevent that. He would just like to share in the space in which those great things will surely happen. Even when he says it to himself, it sounds ridiculous and trite.

He goes slow. Nate will have gone to class already. No reason to hurry.  
He takes his time. Delayed gratification. Pleasure inherent in anticipation.

There's room to pull his bike onto the driveway. It always amuses him that Nate doesn't have a car; he sees no reason to drive in Boston. Brad's never owned a car; his bike is enough but he can't imagine taking public transport every day of his life. He can't conceive of not driving.

In the pocket of his jacket, there's a ring of keys. He's got keys to his parents place on the coast, a key to his sister's condo. He's got a key that belonged to an antique wardrobe in his Mom's childhood room, doing double duty as a fob, alongside the 1st Recon insignia. He's got the keys to his apartment in San Diego, a spare for his bike and then he's got two keys for this place right here, pressed into his palm with a kiss not long after Nate moved in.

He leaves his bike tucked in against the side of the house, shoulders his backpack and climbs three flights of creaking stairs, all the way to Nate's front door. The label beside the buzzer outside simple says 'FICK'.

It's not the first time that he's been in Nate's apartment without him. Nate is conscientious about his commitments, so Brad's sometimes opened his eyes to Nate bending over the bed and taking him by the jaw to kiss him slow and sweet.

“I love you,” he says. “I'll be back soon.”

Nate's bedroom is the first door on the right and that's where Brad goes first. The bed is low, neatly made with clean sheets. There's a pile of textbooks on one side (what Brad instantly thinks of as _Nate_ 's side) and a paperback novel, the place marked with a folded take out menu. Nate's not even here, but Brad can see the shape of him in this place where he spends most of his time. In the bedroom, there's very little out of place; dirty clothes in the hamper, a loaded bookshelf opposite the bed. There's a pair of battered boots tucked at the end of the row next to the closet. 

Brad unpacks what few things he's brought with him; there's an empty drawer waiting in the dresser, spare hangers on the rail. He leaves his leather hanging on the back of the chair in the corner. He leaves his boots by the door. 

The second bedroom is Nate's study and Brad pauses, for a moment, trailing his fingers over surfaces, seeing how Nate fits in here. There's a desk on one side of the room and a futon on the other. The last time he was here, he sat curled on the futon with his laptop, playing World of Warcraft while Nate was working. They'd had sex on the futon more than once and, on one memorable occasion, they'd screwed on Nate's desk (all of the papers carefully put away first). Brad pauses, for a moment, stirring the pens in a mug on the desk with his fingers as he remembers Nate spread out and waiting on the warm coloured wood, lube showing on his pale skin, his lips damp and slightly swollen from being kissed.

He's not quite sure how long he ends up standing there; he loses a chunk of time.

The only sign that Nate might have been a little flustered that morning is in the kitchen. Last night's dishes and pans are stacked neatly in the rack beside the sink, but there's a mug and a crumb strewn plate sitting in the sink, like Nate was so busy doing other things that he left it too late for washing dishes. Brad turns on the faucet and rinses them. He puts away the other dishes and leaves just one on the rack, waiting for Nate to come home.

It feels weird being in the apartment without Nate but Brad makes do, leaving the bathroom door ajar as he strips and steps under the shower. He washes with Nate's soap and shampoo, enjoys the way that a smell that's definitely 'Nate' filters through the steamy air. He spends longer than he needs to in the shower, washing the road off. He stands with both hands flat against the tiles and thinks about the first shower that he took here, the morning after he ended up in bed with Nate for the first time. He stands there and remembers Nate against his back and the way the water had sluiced between them, cold long before they were done.

When he finds himself hard, almost without realising that it was happening, he curls his fingers around his dick and jerks off slowly, eyes closed, thinking about Nate stepping into the shower behind him, kissing and biting the back of his neck, one hand snaking around to cover Brad's and set the pace. The press of Nate's hard-on against his ass. The sides of Nate's fingers stained with ink. _I love you_ , says Nate, his fingers stroking Brad quick and smooth. _I'll be back soon._

Brad comes hard and washes off in cold water.  
It's worth it.

Towel in hand, he pads back into Nate's room, naked. There are framed photos of Nate's family, his mom and dad, dogs, Nate at various ages. That fucking smile. Brad finds himself distracted. There are photos of him and Nate, too, not framed but thumb-tacked to a corkboard. A photo of them in a bar in Harvard, another at a party thrown by a friend of Nate's. There's one of Brad on his own, sitting in a chair on the back deck with his feet up on the rail. He's reading a book, Oakleys on, so it's difficult to read his expression. He's wearing a t-shirt with 'COLBERT' stencilled on the chest. Brad looks at it for a long moment and can't quite classify the way it makes him feel, not the photograph itself but the memory of Nate taking it; it was a day in summer when the humidity finally broke and he'd ended up out there in the very early morning and Nate had found him there, not dressed, sleep-tousled in nothing but his underwear with his camera in his hand.

Brad dresses and retrieves his keys.  
He's wearing his own t-shirt when he leaves the apartment. He risks going out of his mind if he spends the next five hours home alone, just waiting for Nate to return.

*

It's a twenty minute walk, give or take, from Nate's from door to Davis Square, and Brad doesn't hurry, walking with his earbuds in and his hands in his pockets. It's warm without being too hot. He has the vaguest of plans in mind, all of them designed to kill time until dinner. He _could_ take the T to Harvard Square, might even run into Nate there and kill the wait but, somehow, that would feel like cheating. He can wait. He was designed to wait.

He's never really felt like he fit in in a place like this one, but he can see why Nate likes it; it's leafy and quaint, a student-filled, bohemian sort of place, which is unsurprising, really. Brad always felt made to fit in Oceanside; he knew where he belonged there but here, between the neighbourhood Italian restaurant, the used book-stores, the ice cream parlour...Brad doesn't know what he's supposed to do with himself in a place like this.

He supposes that, for Nate, he'd figure out a way.  
Because he's seen Nate here before, and he's decided that it would be worth it, for a place that suits Nate so.

In a crowded café, he pauses. He snags a small, round table by the floor-to-ceiling windows, orders black coffee and something sweet that he won't eat. He sits and people watches, tears it into strips with his fingers. He flicks through a paper left behind by somebody else. The afternoon moves slowly. He imagines Nate sitting in a classroom three stops on the T away, leaning his chin into his hand, diligently taking notes, never allowing his mind to wander.

When he looks up, there's a girl watching him. She's got a pile of books on the table in front of her, white blond hair ruffled on one side of her face. Suntanned and freckled across her nose, she reminds him of nobody so strongly as Jenni, who had always been tousled and lovely, who he'd been in love with for nearly ten years before she dumped him by email. _Home is where your heart is_ , that's the saying, right? Brad had gone a long time without knowing where his heart belonged and then he'd realised that what it actually was just a long way distant.

He's sat here for long enough; he's waited long enough.  
He smiles at her as he gets up, slipping between the crowded tables, observing but not admiring, leaving everything exactly as he found it.

Leaving no trace.

*

He doesn't hear the door open and close; the first time he becomes aware of Nate in the apartment is when arms wrap around him from behind. For a moment, they just stand like that, Nate's arms around his waist, chin against his shoulder. Brad keeps doing what he's doing, looking after the contents of the pans in front of him.

“Well, thank God for that,” says Nate, squeezing Brad's hip, turning his head to graze a kiss against the sharp edge of Brad's jaw. “For a horrible moment, I thought you were trying something new.”

“You fucking love this,” says Brad, smirking, reaching back with one hand to graze his fingers against Nate's ass. Nate's hips shift closer.

“Yes, but only because I know you can _cook_ this,” he points out. “The last time you tried anything else was kind of an unmitigated disaster, Brad.”

“Point.” Brad is a very particular kind of cook; there are about three dishes, this Thai curry included, that he makes fantastically well but everything else is experimental and given to variations in quality. Most of which Nate has suffered through. Gently, he makes himself enough room to turn between Nate and the stove. Nate hasn't even bothered to shrug out of his jacket. He's still wearing his book bag slung across his chest. Brad loves that Nate's hair's grown out; he brushes it back from his forehead and bends the couple of inches that it takes to kiss him.

He feels Nate smile before he sees it.

His hands slide around Nate's waist and down, over his ass, tugging their hips tight together and both of Nate's hands are up and cradling his face. The kiss deepens, six months worth of separation and need seeping in. It's only when his ass clips the counter and a pot lid clatters down to the tiles that Brad realises what they're doing.

And he wants to keep doing it, wants that desperately, but he also knows that Nate hasn't even taken his jacket off and that dinner is nearly ready and that waiting is a thing which strengthens the heart.

Even with that said, it takes all of Brad's considerable resolve to gently disengage from Nate.

“Jacket off. Shower. Dinner'll be ready in half an hour.”

Nate's eyebrow twitches.

“Is that an order, Gunnery Sergeant?”  
“Absolutely it is. And you don't even have a rank to pull on me. So get your ass in the shower.”

With another kiss pressed to the corner of his mouth, Nate pulls away. Brad watches him walk out of the kitchen and drags in a shuddering breath; ignoring his burgeoning hard-on, he goes back to cooking while Nate showers with the door open.

Between the cooking being finished and being ready to dish it up, he pads down the corridor and leans with his hip against the door-frame, watching Nate shower. The long, lean lines of his body haven't changed since Iraq. His hair's might be longer but everything else is still the same. He lingers, for a moment, in the memory of Nate washing off dust with water in a cupped hand. It was one of the only times that Brad saw Nate shirtless in the desert, stripped to the waist with water running from his short hair and down between his shoulder-blades.

“Enjoying the view, Brad?” says Nate, leaning under the full flow of the shower to rinse soap out of his hair.

“Assuredly.”

He wasn't so stupid as to think that Nate wouldn't have realised that he was there.

And dinner's on the table by the time Nate's ready for it, padding across the bare boards in jeans low slung against his hips, white cotton shirt and bare feet. Brad reaches up and brushes a damp strand of hair back from his forehead and leans in to kiss him. It's not a long kiss, but it doesn't need to be; it's comfortable and familiar. It's a kiss that's got absolutely nothing to prove.

“So how was it?” asks Nate, forkful of food paused halfway to his mouth, while Brad's opening beers and their ankles are threaded together under the table.

“Some parts felt longer than others,” says Brad, taking a long swallow of his beer before he picks up his fork. “It was good to see the guys again.” A smile catches the corner of his mouth, but he takes his time chewing. “I'd rather have been here all along.”

“Mmhmm.”

He finds himself distracted by the smallest things: the shape of Nate's hands, his profile when the light catches it, the slip-slide of the muscles in his throat when he leans back in his chair to talk a long swallow of his beer. It's six months since the last time that Nate was in San Diego, another four months before that that Brad was last here. It's not enough, has never been enough but, somehow, they make it work in the knowledge that, eventually, everything might pan out. It all has to do with balance and an awareness of where a heart is lent.

Once they're done eating, Nate stands, reaching for the plates but Brad catches him by the wrist instead.

“Leave it,” he says.

There isn't even a flicker of hesitation on Nate's face. He carries on leaning, catches his weight with one hand on the table and kisses Brad, hot and hard, hungry. It's like the kiss in the kitchen, sure, but it's turned up as loud as it'll go. Brad pushes his fingers into Nate's hair and tugs hard. He feels Nate's breath catch against his mouth. He cradles the side of Nate's face with his free hand, thumb skimming against his skin as he sucks on Nate's bottom lip.

Someone moans, the sound muffled. Brad's not quite sure if it's him or Nate.

“Bed,” says Nate, breaking the kiss, his lips damp and swollen, his eyes slightly wide. He presses another kiss to Brad's mouth and there's a sharp, sudden pain, the edges of his teeth, that Brad feels all the way to the tip of his dick.

No argument here.

They've fucked all over the apartment in the time that Nate's lived here but Brad is never going to turn down the opportunity to lie in a bed with Nate. They kiss before they're even through the door, fumbling backwards and Brad's pulling Nate's t-shirt up over his head and Nate's hands are at Brad's belt, undoing it with a snap of leather. The backs of Brad's knees hit the bed and he sits without fighting it, reaching up to take hold of Nate by the hips and pull him in, pressing a sucking kiss against the flat muscle of his bare belly. Nate pushes ten fingers through Brad's short hair and looks down at him, green eyes dark and unreadable, or unreadable if you didn't know him; it would be a mistake to think that 'careful' meant 'unsure' in Nate Fick's case.

Eyes fixed on Nate's face, Brad tugs open his jeans and finds no underwear underneath. Every so often, Nate still does something to surprise him. He leans in and presses a kiss right above Nate's dick, huffing hot breath against his skin. He curls his fingers around Nate and presses a kiss to the tip. He tips his head back, looking up at him. 

Nate's watching him, lips slightly parted.

“What?” he asks.  
“I want you to fuck my mouth,” says Brad, rolling his wrist to stroke Nate smoothly. His teeth touch his lip and he rides out a wave of powerful arousal. His head spins. He's glad to be sitting down. 

Nate's thumb traces across Brad's mouth, dragging against his damp bottom lip. He turns his head and catches the heel of Nate's hand with a kiss.

“Please.”

Nate's smile is impossibly sweet.

“On your knees, Brad,” he says and Brad slips down onto his knees between Nate and the bed, tugging his t-shirt off over his head as he goes. Nate's right there and Brad doesn't waste any time; he curls his fingers around the shaft of Nate's dick and bends his head, sliding his lips over the first few inches. Almost immediately, Nate rocks his hips and Brad thanks God for a well suppressed gag reflex. He wants as much of Nate as he can handle; he takes his dick as deep as he can. Nate's fingers are still tight in his hair, all but dragging his mouth down onto his dick and God, it's so good, it feels so good. He groans, both of his hands on Nate's hips to steady himself and his hard-on throbs but he leaves it because right now, all he wants is for Nate to come in his mouth and, if he's coming, he's doing it by Nate's hand or nothing.

He's spent long enough imagining the details of this.

Above him, Nate moans, soft at first but getting louder and Brad's hands slip around from his hips to his ass, squeezing, pulling him in tighter. Holding his head, Nate rocks his hips, pushing past Brad's lips over and over and, Jesus, if it's possible to get enough of this, it hasn't happened yet. Brad's fingers stray, brushing down the cleft of Nate's ass, rubbing against his asshole and he feels the way that Nate's hips jerk at the touch.

Another couple of strokes and Nate's pulling back, wrapping his own fingers around his dick as soon as it's free from Brad's mouth, squeezing, dragging in a breath through his nose before he opens his eyes. Brad's always been helpless in the face of a direct look from Nate like that, from the first moment he'd met him and Nate had offered him his hand.

“What?” he asks, scrambling back up onto the bed, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, but Nate's already leaning down, his knee hitting the bed between Brad's thighs as he leans down to take a kiss, mouth hot and damp, licking his way between Brad's lips and following it with a moan.

“I really want to fuck the shit out of you,” he says, smudging kisses down from the corner of Brad's mouth and over his jaw, his hand shoved down inside Brad's underwear, fingers curled around his dick, but not stroking, not yet. It's a possessive sort of touch. _Mine, for now. Mine, while you're here._

Brad doesn't quite have either the words or the presence of mind to tell Nate that that's always true. He suspects that Nate knows anyway.

He can't squirm out of his jeans and underwear quick enough. Stretched out, sprawled naked across Nate's bed, he pulls up his knees, lets them fall wide apart. He tries to remember if there's ever been a moment when he was embarrassed by this? There's something deep at the heart of him, in that part of him labelled 'Warrior Spirit' that thinks that maybe he _ought_ to hate it, lying there this spread open and vulnerable, want written this clear on his face but Brad shoves that down because here he is with the only man he's ever loved and nothing has ever felt as right as being with Nate does.

Fuck it.  
When he dreams, he dreams about being in Iraq or in this room.

He lies back and watches Nate kneeling between his thighs, lube in his hand, condom between his lips. His hips lift eagerly. Fumbling, Nate bites his lip as he rolls the condom down over his dick, bites it again as he slicks his fingers. He wastes no time, pressing the tip of one against Brad's asshole, and Brad closes his eyes and wills himself to relax because there is nothing that he wants more than Nate inside him, skin on skin, flush, heat.

“Just fuck me,” he says, as Nate pushes one finger into him. He rolls his hips, fucking himself on it and, for a moment, Nate doesn't even move his hand. Brad pulls him down for a kiss, riding down against his finger and he feels Nate's breath hot and quick against his mouth. They both know better than to rush into anything; this isn't about pain, but it's still intensely and incredibly frustrating to be forced to slow right down as Nate opens him up carefully, thoroughly, already pressing another finger in alongside the first.

They breath together and Brad rocks his hips and it's nowhere near enough.

Three fingers inside him, Nate groans softly and presses a kiss against the corner of his mouth.

“Are you ready?” he asks. 

Brad reaches up and cups his face with both hands.

“I love you and I need you to fuck me. Right now.”

Never let it be said that Nate Fick does not know what's good for him. He shifts his weight on his knees, one hand on Brad's shoulder and the other between them. He slides in slowly, four months were worth waiting through slowly, and Brad's back arches, pushing his hips down onto every inch. He's always thought that Nate had a beautiful dick.

They have no right to move together this beautifully; they haven't spent enough time together to know each other this well. They snatch time in shared beds, fuck when they can, talk on the phone. It's a relationship in pieces but both of them are Marines forever, one way or another, physically in the Corps or not, and one thing is always certain: Marines know how to make do. Brad knows that there's not much in the world that he wouldn't do not to be able to snatch moments like this with Nate. Maybe he wouldn't give up the Corps, but Nate wouldn't _let_ him give up the Corps and, so, fumbling, they make do.

And it won't end up with a ring on anybody's finger but the sex will always be this good and Brad will always know, in his heart of hearts, that he is truly loved.

It's not going to last nearly long enough. He can feel that already. He bucks under Nate's weight and Nate has one hand on the bed-frame for leverage, pounding into him and it's all that Brad can do to press his face against Nate's shoulder and take it. His fingers dig into Nate's hip and the side of his neck. He kisses what skin he can reach with his mouth.

“Come on,” he mumbles. “Come on, come on.” He repeats it like a mantra, like the simple three or four line prayers his mother taught him when he was a child. “Come on and come for me, Nate.”

Nate's orgasm slams into him, seems to knock all of the breath out of him and Brad's only a couple of steps behind him, following over, right alongside. Spent, Nate collapses on top of him. He bites Brad's shoulder hard as the aftershocks are fading. Brad finds himself thinking fondly of scars.

They curl together with a mess of sheets between them, a patchwork quilt dragged up onto top of them and their sweaty, eager limbs. He falls asleep with Nate's head pillowed on his shoulder. The bite-mark on his shoulder aches but, in the morning, there'll barely be a bruise.


	3. Fiddler's Green

He opens his eyes and he's in Iraq again. It's not unfamiliar. It's sad that he feels at home here; he feels more settled in his skin in this place. He knows what job he has to do. In a rational part of his mind, he's aware that he's not really here, knows that he's somewhere else, sated and sleeping in Nate's arms. This is not a rational thing though. He accepts his lack of MOPP suit; he accepts a t-shirt stencilled 'FICK'; he accepts the fragrant cool of the early evening.

He accepts.

Brad bends to unlace his combat boots. They rested in this wadi. Rudy made coffee. He remember sleeping in the sun for a couple of hours. Amid the chaos, a little piece of quiet. 

Birds in the trees. The muted hum of insects. People think that Iraq is all desert but that's not true. Parts of it remember how to be a garden. 

He leaves his boots lying on their side in the grass.

He becomes aware of her all of a sudden; he hadn't seen her before, bent low over her knees in the long grass. There's something about her that reminds him of his sister. When he was a kid, it bothered him for about five minutes that his sister favoured their mother where he never could. This woman is dark eyed and dark haired, not so much beautiful as remarkable. There is something utterly remarkable about her, but quietly so, and she sits there with her chin resting on one knee. Her uniform looks crisp and white against the faded palette of the desert.

“Hello, Marine,” she says and she looks at him and smiles.  
“Ma'am,” he says, sinking down to sit beside her.  
“I was just looking for the ocean,” she says, biting the inside of her lip. “There's never any ocean anymore. So I try and picture it, and you know what? Turns out that's a goddamn trial when it's not right there in front of ya.”

Brad grew up next to the ocean, learned to surf before he learned to ride a bike, but even he knows that going looking for the ocean in the desert is a sure road to disappointment. 

He pauses.

“What're we doing here?” he asks her. She looks at him, dark eyes shrewd and sure.

“Waiting,” she says. “Well, I am. You're just visiting.”  
“...Waiting for what?”

She tilts her head. A smile tugs at the corner of her mouth. He feels measured. When she's done, he feels lacking.

“How much do you know about Heaven, Marine?”  
“Brad,” he says, gently. “My name is Brad.  
“Okay,” she says, flashing a truer smile than before and he's pretty sure that he falls a little bit in love with her, like Beth and Sharahah before her, and he has to wonder where all of these remarkable women were, when his heart was still his own to lose.

She offers him her hand and he takes it.

“Good to meet you, Brad. Lena Basilone.” The name is familiar. He hopes that there isn't a Marine alive who wouldn't recognise the name; he's cynical enough to know that that is not the case. “Welcome to Fiddler's Green.”

The 'heaven' question suddenly makes more sense. It's another thing that not every Marine would know, but something that Brad knows, all the same. Fiddler's Green is the end, a far green end, beyond a wide ocean. Marines make do but, eventually, like all sailors and every fucker else given to the sea, they eventually find their reward.

“It looks like Iraq,” he says, dumbly. 

She nods.

“Because it's you,” she says. “It always looks like California to me.”  
“But no ocean.”

Her mouth purses. She shakes her head.

“Not without him,” she says.  
They sit in silence for a while.

He frowns and turns to look at her. She has her eyes closed and the wind is stirring the loose curls of her hair around her face. He never saw weather like he saw in Iraq: the way the wind would blow in from the desert so suddenly, the sand scraping all of the sense out of everything. Here, there is nothing but a breeze stirring Lena's hair and the collar of her uniform.

“It's been a long time since that war ended,” he says.

She nods, smooths her hair back from her face. There's a gold wedding band on her finger.

“I can wait,” she says. “I could wait forever for him.”  
“And you're sure he's coming?”

She nods. 

“Oh, yeah,” she says, still nodding. “I'll wait and, eventually, he'll come walking around the bend and the ocean'll be right there behind him. And all of that waiting will be worth it.”

Brad understands completely.

“There's a firebase in Helmand Province called Fiddler's Green,” he says, and he shifts his weight, digging a tin of Copenhagen out of his pocket. In the end, he doesn't dip. He turns the tin over and over between his fingers and Lena reaches out, taking it out of his hands and opening it. She sniffs it. Her black eyelashes flutter.

“I never wanted another man again,” she says, and she smiles. Brad finds himself smiling in return. When he tilts his head, he can hear fiddle music, reminiscent of those nights that he and Nate sat in Irish bars and it felt like, yes, this could actually be his life.

Lena stands up. In the way of dreams, her white uniform changes, slips into polka dots and a flared hem. She brushes her fingers through black curls and holds out both her hands to him.

“Come here and dance with me, Marine.”

Brad has never been a good dancer; it makes him awkward and self-conscious. It's one of the only times when he ever truly feels his height. He sits in the sand, looking up at Sergeant Lena Basilone and it occurs to him say _no, I'll wait this one out_ but then he realises two things: that it's hard to say 'no' to the truly remarkable ones, the roaring girls, and that you shouldn't ever look a gift-horse in the mouth.

He pushes to his feet, and takes Lena by the hands.

It's not really dancing, what they end up doing. They mostly stand together, her hands on his shoulders, her arms around his waist. Her head rests against his chest. What Brad knows about this woman is this: that she returned ten thousand dollars and refused a government burial plot in Arlington; that she knew a man for seven months, renounced all claim on his memory, loved him for her entire life. It's not really dancing, but it's enough.

“Tell me I'm not crazy,” she says, muffled against his shoulder.  
“You're not crazy,” he tells her. “I'd have waited too.”

And always the fiddle music and a beat that they can't quite follow.

In the end, they part and Lena stretches up onto her tiptoes to kiss Brad's cheek.

“What rank?” she asks him.  
“Captain. Technically.”

That smile again. She raises one eyebrow.

“Worth it?”

Brad nods, not even a flicker of a doubt in his heart.

“Absolutely.”

This time, she kisses him on the mouth. A sweet kiss, but yielding and chaste. A goodbye kiss. A _fare you well though we'll never meet again_ sort of kiss.

“Be good,” she tells him and then turns and walks away, the desert breeze ruffling her skirt out from her thighs. Brad watches her go and then he turns and walks back to the grassy wadi. He lies down and closes his eyes. The sun shines down on him and it's easy to forget that Iraq is supposed to be mostly desert.

The last thing he wonders if why you never remember when you fall asleep in dreams?  
And fare you well, Sergeant. Fare you well.

*  
He opens his eyes in time to watch Nate pad across the bedroom naked and slip back into bed. There's a slight chill clinging to his skin and Brad wraps himself around him, chasing it away. 

Nate turns his head, presses his nose into the pillow and stifling a yawn.

“How long are you here?” he asks, and Brad knows that he knows already, knows that there's a datebook somewhere with his trip neatly pencilled in, but he's in love with this man, so he humours him.

“Seventy-two hours and the rest of tonight,” he says.  
He lifts his head enough to watch Nate smile, already drifting back to sleep.

“We're not getting out of bed at all tomorrow,” he says, stifling another yawn. “Except to answer the door to the pizza guy.”

Brad presses a kiss behind his ear.

“Whatever you say,” he tells him. There's a moment when there's no sound in the room but the two of them breathing. “Nate?”

“Hmmm?”  
“I'd wait for you forever,” he tells him. No response except for the soft rise and fall of Nate's breathing. Brad files it away.

Sleep eludes him. On Nate's side of the bed, there's a collection of poetry by Constantine Cavafy, columns of text, original and translation. The Greek looks so foreign to Brad that he can barely comprehend that it must be language. He turns to the page that Nate marked with a folded corner.

_When you set sail for Ithaca,  
wish for the road to be long,   
full of adventures, full of knowledge_

it strikes a chord. He lies down beside Nate again, the book against his hip and it's like he can see the whole journey and all the journeys to come spread out ahead of him, criss-crossing America like veins and maybe the war will end soon and maybe it won't, but the truth is that he'll wait forever and that Odysseus journeyed for fifteen years and that there is no limit on how far Brad Colbert can go.

He lies in Nate's bed and listens to his lover breathing and the beginning of birdsong in the trees in the street outside.


End file.
